CHINNOR BIKE DAYZ X1V

[John Bell]

I am providing and engineering my PA and stage lighting again, for this year's charity biker event/music fest, run by the Wycombe Motorcycle Action Group.

It will run from 2nd-4th of July and I aim to be there on Thursday 1st, so that I can program my lighting desk the night before.

www.wycombemag.co.uk/chinnor.htm

If you are into bikes, great music, quality mobile food, beer tent drinking and camping-out with friendly bikers and their families, this is a great annual event that raises funds for very worthy causes.

If any new sound engineers would like to assist and get some experience, please reply to this thread.

I will actually be performing with my new project band, THE POACHERS, opening Saturday's live music at midday.
The band is made up of members "poached" from STOLEN (me, on drums/vox), HANDLE WITH CARE (Jess, rhythm guitar/vox & Snowy, bass) and JONESTOWN (Clive, lead/rhythm guitar/vox).
You can expect some beefed-up HWC fave's and new material, including some un-expected covers.

Andy Lee will be on the FOH while I am performing, unless someone is up for some live engineering experience and Andy can assist you.Cheers, John.

[John Bell]

I will be away all next week, making changes to my FOH racks and testing all of my sound and lighting equipment ready for Chinnor.

As I did not eventually purchase the JBL PRX515's that I was considering as an up-grade, (not in stock anywhere), I will be using Jon Wilmer's Turbosound cabs and amp, to add to my full rig. Jon organizes the live music for this annual charity event.

I will endeavor to get some photos of this great event and post them on this site.

Cheers John.

[John Bell]

I arrived at the site on Thursday 1st July afternoon, expecting the stage to have been completed. I wanted to rig my stage lighting and program some more scenes into my new lighting desk. (I tried to do it in my studio, but it was just blinding).
Due to the staging not being delivered as promised and eventually had to be collected 2 days late, the roof was still not covered. I assisted as much as I could until it was too dark and unsafe to carry on. It took until 12:00 on Friday to finish it, as the ropes for the tarps we missing.

This gave me just 7 hours to rig my stage lighting and full PA and get it all working for the sound check.
Thanks to the magnificent efforts of Andy Lee, Jason, Spike and myself, we managed it.

I received some great complements from the bands for the monitoring, and the sound out front was nice and clean but not as powerful as I would have liked.
I did not have time to rig Jon Wilmer's TurboSound cabs and amp (which are now looking a bit tatty as he does not use covers).

The drummers really liked my 1.6kw stereo drum fill and the 4x JBL MRX 512's allowed the vocalists to move across the whole stage, while giving it some large to the audience.

The 2x DBX AFS 224 units, leveled the 4x monitor zones very quickly and I still had the 4x 31 band graphics in series after them, to enable manual intervention for contouring.

The 22x LED pars really set the moods for the shows and drew in the audience in the evenings. This set-up was easily the best that I have ever achieved and really looked professional.

I had arranged for my daughter to take loads of pics, but she had to work night shift all week and couldn't make it.
There were lots of photos taken, so I will try to get some posted.

The Thames Valley and Chiltern Air Ambulance couldn't touch down as it was too busy, but we did get a low fly-past and a wave. Even the Red Arrows flew by, but nothing to do with us.

Another great Chinnor Bike Dayz and it's getting better each year, apart from the stage not being completed on time again.
At least this year, we had proper staging and not just scaffold boards.

Next year the organizers are going to hire in a flat-bed, fold-down stage, with it's own roof, at considerable cost. This will eliminate the rigging delays and give a much more professional look. I will beef-up my FOH PA and then we will be at the next level of improvement. Cheers, John.

[John Bell]

There are now some band and stage pics on the Wycombe MAG site.

www.wycombemag.co.uk/chinnor.htm
in the photo gallery Chinnor Bike Dayz 2010


Cheers, John.